Quote:
Originally Posted by HotHotHeat
Isn't the reason the US marches all over the world policing everybody to protect American interests? No one said anything about humanitarian efforts in Darfur.
Bottom line is if religious fundamentalism is on the rise, Islam and the Western World are going to have one hell of a hard time getting along.
Politically, the USA does not care how they're viewed on the world scale...As long as they're the most influential.
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The problem is that how they're viewed greatly impacts their influence. They've seriously limited their ability to influence the middle east both diplomatically and economically, which leaves just military influence, which isn't very strong given the current obligations that their military has. They're still influential among western powers, but the only way they'll be able to diplomatically or economically exert influence in the middle-east is by first building consensus amongst western powers. And they haven't been terribly good at that lately, either.
In regards to the rise of islamic fundamentalism and the solutions to it, the recent Rand Corp. report was very good, I thought. Not necessarily saying things that haven't been said before, but providing some very good in depth analysis on the issue:
http://www.rand.org/news/press/2008/02/11/